Billy Gibbons Tone-1st Album - LP-Supa Fuzz-Metroamp 12000

[Krinkle]

I'm a BFG fanatic, especially the old stuff, always trying to cop that tone. This is the closest I've gotten to the first album, but I think that I can do much better. I realized after recording that maybe I could use more fuzz (isn't that always the case). I should record more often, it was obvious when I played it back. I can get plenty more fuzz out of the SF. Then again the cheap camera lost a bunch of my low end, which was fuzzing fairly well in the room.

http://s793.photobucket.com/albums/yy21 ... V07226.mp4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Gear:
Les Paul (SD Pearly Gates Bridge PUP)
Homemade Supa Fuzz
Metroamp 12000
Celestion 25W Greenback Speakers (6402 cones)

Songs (Parts of):
Neighbor, Neighbor
Bedroom Thang
Brown Sugar
Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings (not the first album but one of my fav's)

Any other BFG fanatics out there?

[Ted B]

That sounds like a lot of fun to me.

Since you've gone through this much trouble, if that is a plain jane Les Paul, and if you haven't already swapped to 500k+CTS pots and '50s wiring for that guitar, I highly recommend you consider this:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Les-Paul-Wired-CTS- ... 19c6f7d8b9

Be sure to specify '50s wiring scheme, and your tone controls will function exactly like Billy's guitar. Believe me when I say this makes a difference.



Finally, a detailed article on Billy's early sound:

http://www.tonequest.com/pdf_pubs/sampl ... 2Proof.pdf

[Krinkle]

It IS a lot of fun, very easy to spend a lot of time cranking out power chords and riffs. I've tried many other pedals, the Supa Fuzz is the one that gets me the closest. Want to hear something else that you might find funny? I read that a guy sat next to Billy Gibbons when he plugged in to play on some amp and he took all of the tone controls and rolled them to zero and put the gain and volume to 10. My P,B,M, & T are all at 0 in this clip.

LP is a 94. 100th anniversary of Gibson, that's about the only thing special about it. I've already converted it to 59 wiring and used Sozo caps.

My next move will probably be buying pots that have a taper that is closer to the vintage ones. There are a LOT of shades of distortion/overdrive between 4 and 10 on the guitar's volume pots. I think that if I had ones that were closer to vintage I would get a better spread, a lot of them are bunched too closely between 8 and 10, and I have to barely touch the knob to dal them in. I've heard that the old pots had more of a 70:30 or even 60:40, as opposed to the 80:20 of the newer ones. Just stuff I've read on the net, might not be true.

Thank for the link, excellent read.

[Ted B]

LP is a 94. 100th anniversary of Gibson, that's about the only thing special about it. I've already converted it to 59 wiring and used Sozo caps.

My next move will probably be buying pots that have a taper that is closer to the vintage ones.

I've always felt the Supafuzz sounded a bit better than the MkII Tonebender. The difference is only four components.

If you've done '50s wiring and caps, you're off to a good start.

The taper of current CTS pots is a little different from vintage, but in my experience, it's not that vivid. But definitely check the value of the pots in your LP. Standard LP pots are typically (AFAIK) 300k, whereas a PAF needs a 500k pot (vintage spec value) to get full output. Even so, many '500k' pots end up being 440-460k. I've had good experience obtaining them from Ebay seller to which I pointed, who guarantees each pot to be at least 500k (I'm sure he disassembles and tweaks them).

[garbeaj]

Sounds nice! I like SupaFuzzes and Loud Willy too...though I used to plug my old Goldtop Les Paul straight into my Sears Silvertone 1482 for a Gibbons ZZ Top's First Album tone...sometimes I would use my Les Paul with my old Tube Screamer going into an old Leslie 910 solid state pre-amp/rotating speaker set-up to try for what is hands down my favorite ZZ Top song and tone ever: "Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell". It is a song so epic in it's power that I can only compare it to "Purple Rain"...surely one of the most overlooked tunes of all time. I wish I could get the sound of my 1482 Silvertone to have the Leslie sound, which I could accomplish for recording by mic'ing the SIlvertone and then feeding that into the Leslie somehow. I'm not knowledgable enough with amps to figure out how to achieve this as a live tone...

I just got a great MK 1.5 SupaFuzz built by Stuart Castledine who worked on my grey 1966 Vox wah-wah. He built the Mk 1.5 SupaFuzz circuit into a SolaSound Mk 1.5 Tonebender housing that I had. It sounds great...better than my D*A*M SolaSound Professional Mk II Tonebender. It is still not exactly THE Page Tonebender sound (no one has figured that out yet) but I feel like the SupaFuzz is closer, or at least a generally better sounding fuzz than the Mk II builds that are out there...

I never even thought of using a SupaFuzz for early Gibbons...but hearing your great clip is really making me want to try it, though a Les Paul into my SIlvertone IS "Brown Sugar" and "Sure Got Cold After The Rain Fell" tone-wise to my ears. I don't have a Les Paul currently, otherwise I would make a clip (my ex-girlfriend pawned my $3,000 1987 '57 reissue goldtop Gibson Les Paul for $50 and it disappeared in 2000... ) but when I get my '58 reissue Korina Flying V fixed I'll try it!